


Of teacups and time

by chimosa



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: F/M, Hannibal's little notebook, M/M, Time Travel, Trope Bingo Round 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-10 18:38:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4402865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chimosa/pseuds/chimosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>AN: Post-Digestivo (spoilers up until then), takes place during next episode's time jump (but everything to do with that time jump is pure conjecture on my part)</i> </p><p>The parcel comes in the mail; a nondescript manila envelope that contains only a notebook filled with equations.  When he thumbs through the pages an unsigned note flutters to the floor and Will knows Hannibal’s handwriting too intimately to fool himself into thinking anyone but he had written it. </p><p>  "The teacup has been unbroken."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of teacups and time

**Author's Note:**

> A million thank yous to [mandybling](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mandybling/works) for the amazing beta work!

The parcel comes in the mail; a nondescript manila envelope that contains only a notebook filled with equations. When he thumbs through the pages an unsigned note flutters to the floor and Will knows Hannibal’s handwriting too intimately to fool himself into thinking anyone but he had written it. 

_The teacup has been unbroken._

He shuts the notebook in a drawer as he hears the front door open and Molly’s shout of “Anybody home?” echoes through their new home. 

Will has a life now and if there is anyone that knows how precious and fleeting that is, it’s Will, who has spent so much of his consumed with death. Teacups, time, and the rules of disorder can wait. Hannibal can wait. Will finally has a life, a home, a _family_ and he’s determined to enjoy it all for as long as he possibly can. 

***  
Will is a good fisherman. He knows the secret to an effective lure is that it contains more than one hook. 

All the better to pierce a fish regardless of the angle it strikes.

***  
Will had said he didn’t want to think about Hannibal anymore, and that much hasn’t changed.

He’d be lying, though, if he said he didn’t think about the notebook from time to time. 

***  
Walter falls through the ice on a Saturday. 

They weren’t even supposed to be fishing that morning. Will had promised Molly they would meet her in town for lunch and she knows how Will loses time whenever he’s out on the pond behind their home.

But, still, Will is a new enough stepfather that he can’t quite deny the serious and quiet boy when his face lights up as he talks about the new lure he’s been working on under Will’s supervision. 

“Can we try it out? Today?” Walter asks, ten years old and more wistful than any child his age ought to be. 

The ice isn’t thin where Will begins to hack a hole with a hand chisel. There’s easily four inches to punch through and that’s why he doesn’t pay much attention as Walter begins to walk away from him on the ice, talking excitedly about all the fish he’s going to catch. 

Will smiles. “Oh yeah?” he calls over the sound of cutting ice. He has vague memories of being that enthusiastic once, memories that only began coming to him after Walter came into his life. “Big talk for someone who hasn’t even tested their lure yet.”

“I don’t need to test it,” Walter calls back. “I already know it’s the best.”

Will doesn’t even see the moment the ice caves in and drags the boy into the frigid pond. All he knows is one minute Walter is on the ice with him and the next he’s gone. 

Will crawls on his hands and knees to the hole in the pond--new and growing-- calling Walter’s name desperately, but there’s no response. If the shock of freezing water hadn’t rendered him unconscious he might have had a chance to get out on his own. As it is, Will brushes snow off the ice, tries to catch a glimpse of the boy he had come to think of as a son. Will is all too aware that each moment that passes that he doesn’t find Walter is another that his brain is starved of oxygen. 

When he finally catches sight of a dark shadow pressed against the ice below him Will punches a hole in it with his chisel and tries not to notice how blue the boy’s face is as he pulls him to safety. He yanks off Walter’s sodden coat and wraps his stepson in the one he’s wearing, praying to a God he gave up on long ago that the heat that still clings to it from Will’s body can warm the boy’s cheeks back to pink. 

CPR is futile when Walter’s eyes are staring blankly ahead as they are, but Will can’t stop himself from trying. Long, long minutes pass and the only sounds on the lonely pond are the ones Will makes as he works to breathe life back into Walter. The muscles in his arms are trembling with fatigue when he finally sits back on his heels, defeated. 

He is so winded his vision is streaked with white and his cheeks burn where the tracks of his tears are dusted with frost. The gray day has grown even grayer as a storm rolls in, so different from the bright and anticipatory morning that might as well have been weeks ago for all that Will has lost track of the hour. 

Nonsensical as it is, Will thinks then of the notebook, still tucked away in the end table’s drawer. Hannibal had been many things. He’d been a manipulator and a murderer, yes, but he wasn’t a liar. Not to Will, at any rate. 

If he said he’d managed to make a teacup come together again...

He finds it, just where he had left it, dogs barking excitedly as he rushes through the house. With hands still wet and numb he finds the last page and the figures that had once looked like a strange hieroglyphics suddenly make their own kind of sense when he slides back into the headspace that Hannibal had occupied once upon a time. 

A pendulum swings like it hasn’t in two years and he can almost smell burning toast...

When his eyes open everything is just as it had been that morning. It’s been years since he had an encephalitis flair up so drastic he couldn’t tell fantasy from fact. He knows now when he’s hallucinating and this... this isn’t a hallucination and this isn’t his imagination. 

This is real. 

“Can we try it out? Today?” Walter asks, the morning light cuts through the breakfast nook and Will is so fucking grateful he wants to fall to his knees right there, his chest threatens to burst open under the pressure of satiated hope.

He grinds his teeth against the unwieldy weight of emotion and manages to say: “Not today, Buddy.”

Walter is disappointed, sure, as he clears his plate of picked-at scrambled eggs and blackened crusts, but he’s _alive_ and Will can’t stop staring at the boy as he perches in front of the television with a game controller.

Two hours later Will settles in next to him and they take turns trying to beat each other’s scores in a game Will can barely remember how to play. 

Over lunch Walter brags about how badly he beat Will and Molly beams, delighted that the two of them are finding new things to do together. 

*  
Will knows he has an addictive personality. It’s genetic, after all, and his old man drank himself into an early grave. He knew it when he hoarded dogs at his little house in Wolf Trap, and he knew it when he became addicted to helping Jack solve the next bizarre murder and the next bizarre murder, even as it ripped his sanity to shreds. He always figured he’d eventually succumb to the alcoholism he flirts with whenever he gets so far in his head that he can just barely find his way out again, that it’s just a matter of time.

His relationship with Hannibal was an addiction, he can see that now. One that he has spent the past two years trying to detox from. He’s mostly purged Hannibal from his mind, if it weren’t for the damn notebook. 

There are rules to it, he quickly finds. Of course there are rules. Hannibal always liked his little rules; his amoral code of ethics that only he himself could navigate and mete out punishment when one of his twisted, convoluted laws was breeched. A self-appointed God with a New Testament veneer and an Old Testament heart. 

Will can’t go forward in time. He tries once, and it’s like getting hit by a semi truck. It takes him three days lying in bed trying to relearn how to breathe to get over that one. Molly is concerned, but he waves her away with a wheeze and she takes his gravelly voice as proof that he’s fighting a cold. She makes him chicken soup from a can and checks his forehead with a kind palm and he falls a little more in love with her for it.

He can go back as far as he wants, but it has to be someplace he’s been before. Ancient Rome is out, but if it’s something he’s lived through, then he can close his eyes and watch the gold pendulum swing him back to that exact day and time. 

He takes it slow, jumping back in time in small increments. A day previous, and then a week, and then a month. His wedding to Molly was a terribly-planned, pathetic, semi-public spectacle that coincided with a massive rain storm, and he goes back to make sure that yes, it really was as awful as he remembers. So Will decides to change it. The next time he goes back further and, when they are surrounded by venue contracts and guest lodging logistics, he takes her hands in his own and says: “You know, I think a simple courthouse wedding would be best.”

The next day they run down to city hall, the bride wears a short green dress and sandals while the groom manages to unearth a sports coat he had worn with more regularity a lifetime ago. It’s quick and as easy as breathing and afterwards they take Walter down to Applebee’s where the boy orders three courses of dessert while they all laugh at his increasingly sugar-fueled delirium. Will never has to suffer through the rainstorm in an ill-fitting tuxedo or the tense standoff with Molly’s former in-laws who make it clear to Will the entire time that they want nothing more than to scoop up their deceased son’s family and take them back to Oregon where they belong. 

It’s pretty much perfect. 

When he gets back to his own time, though, things are different. They are living in the Florida Keys, for one thing. And as much as he might have appreciated the sand and the sun-kissed life, it’s just not where he belongs. He misses his flannel and sweaters and he just can’t get used to all those pairs of leg-baring shorts he finds in his drawer. So he sucks it up, jumps back and sets to right what all he had changed: painfully awkward wedding, rain-soaked tuxedo, hostile in-laws and all. 

***  
Will never lies to Molly. She knew the man she married is a broken one, and he’s never tried to mask that from her. In return she doesn’t ask prying questions and trusts that when things get really bad he’ll say something. He doesn’t lie to her but he has developed some bad habits that he can’t quite shake, the sins of half-truths and glaring omissions being chief among them. He doesn’t tell Molly about his time with the FBI or the months spent in the Hospital for the Criminally Insane, just like he doesn’t tell her he has learned how to travel through time. He rationalizes it by telling himself that were she to ask, he would come clean, but she doesn’t _know_ to ask and that works well enough for him.

It doesn’t escape Will that his glib game of half-answers are the last remnants of Hannibal still sliding through his bloodstream and oh how the other man would be so fucking _amused_ at that. 

***  
For the most part Will ignores the newspapers they have delivered to the house every Sunday. He’ll take the crossword puzzle out from time to time and sometimes browse the sports section and that’s as far as he’ll get. Sometimes Molly will half heartedly ruffle through the rest, but most weeks the newspaper stays folded in the center of the kitchen table, a plastic bag-shrouded reminder that they keep meaning to cancel their subscription. 

The snow storm that’s been rolling in and out for weeks finally settles on top of their little house with menacing intent. The wind blows through the attic and moans like a man disemboweled, but Will keeps that observation to himself. Every now and then the power flickers and Will plants flashlights and batteries strategically through the house for when the electricity is finally knocked out for good. 

They are homebound and Will decides to make the most of it; unwrapping a month’s worth of Sunday crossword puzzles and planting himself in the easy chair that has, over the years, come to be known as “his”. When the lights finally succumb to the wind and snow, the battery-powered lamp he has ready sheds enough light for him to continue with his puzzle unhampered.

That is until he gets to 15 across: 19 letters. Baltimore serial diner. Begins with “H” and goddamn Freddie Lounds for bringing _that_ cute little moniker into common parlance. 

Suddenly the darkness isn’t as comforting as it was. Will has taken it on faith that the furniture and walls that are just out of the lamplight’s reach are still there, but now it’s like they fall away and he is cast adrift. He is unmoored from reality and it is a simple thing to imagine that he is alone in the world. Will rubs his hands roughly against his eyes as he fights the memories that strum like finely-tuned chords through his veins. 

The lies. The manipulations. The blood spilled and the flesh rent and the body count piled too high for comfort. 

For three years he has kept thoughts of Hannibal Lecter at bay, but now, in the dark and amidst the storm, Will can’t help remembering him. He closes his eyes and opens his mind and lets his memories stitch together to create a semblance of the man he once knew better than himself. 

He feels something akin to grief when he realizes that after all the time that’s passed he can’t quite remember the timbre of Hannibal’s voice. 

***  
He won’t go for very long. That’s what he tells himself as he searches for the notebook by flashlight, rifling through his sock drawer where he had last hidden it away, though from himself or Molly he can’t say. 

He won’t change anything. He won’t try to make things better or worse. He’ll just observe, just for a minute or two. 

The notebook is in his hand and the pendulum swings and as usually happens wherever Hannibal Lecter is concerned, Will realizes just a shade too late that he’s made a mistake.

***  
Like the addict that he is, once Will starts to thumb through the saga that is Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, he can’t bring himself to stop.

He is consumed, flitting from time to time. He tries to live up to his promise-- to only observe-- but there are times when he can’t contain himself. Times when Hannibal is insufferably smug with his double speak and his dinner guests--usually Jack-- are none the wiser. When what Hannibal needs most in the world is a steak knife through the thigh. There are other times when Hannibal steps so close that Will can’t help but tilt his chin to close the distance between their faces and capture Hannibal’s lips with his own.

The times when Will loses control he takes care to go back and make things right.

Eventually though even his small acts of rebellion aren’t enough. Will watches Hannibal play his games of cat and mouse with remorse and shame thick in his throat. He watches as Hannibal cuts and carves Will into his perfect little plaything and soon he doesn’t even recognize himself anymore. 

More than anything he begins to wonder what would happen if he and Hannibal Lecter had never met.

Will knows the risks. He knows the potential consequences are profound and limitless. Still, he has just relived his life for all the years he’s spent with Hannibal and for his sanity’s sake he’s got to try.

So he closes his eyes and he’s back in Virginia, the day before he’s scheduled to teach at Quantico. He leaves a message for Dr. Bloom and asks with polite professionalism if his colleague wouldn’t mind covering his classes for him for the foreseeable future.

And then he preemptively checks himself into a mental facility where Agent Jack Crawford will have no choice but to leave him alone. 

***  
Will returns to what should be home, but everything is different. For one, there’s no Molly or Walter. For another he’s still in Wolf Trap, but nothing feels the same. He logs onto his computer and checks that he’s come back to the right date. On a whim he searches for tattlecrime.com and finds that the most recent entry is dated nine months earlier. A google search pulls up the obituary for Freddie Lounds, whose murder is covered in as lurid detail as she would have written about it, herself. 

He searches for more names as they come to him. Jack Crawford, Federal agent tasked with bringing down the Chesapeake Ripper: dead. Alana Bloom, the psychologist charged with profiling the Ripper for Agent Crawford: dead. Abigail Hobbs, he finds, has been missing for years and he pulls up a video clip where her father, choking back tears, pleads for information leading to his daughter’s whereabouts. But, like all the area girls that were kidnapped before and after her, no leads are ever found. 

He’s so sickened by what he’s found of this brave new world that he shuts off his browser before he can look up what’s happened to Hannibal. 

A walk should clear his head, he thinks, and he’s a good thirty feet away from his front door before he realizes that of all the dogs following at his heels, Winston isn’t one of them.

***  
He’s running out of time.

Will can feel it in his bones. Now that he’s set things back into motion, there’s a countdown that’s been flashing banner-high in the back of his mind. He knows it’s only a matter of time before he sees Hannibal again and it won’t be through a time traveller’s eyes. 

There’s still one time and place Will hasn’t been able to bring himself to visit, yet: the last time he and Hannibal had seen one another. 

But if he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it all the way, and so he grips the notebook, rides the golden swing of the pendulum, and soon he’s opening his eyes to a snowy morning as a door snicks open and closes with soft deference to his convalescent state. 

Will props himself up with one arm and he’s forgotten how beaten and bruised his body had felt the morning after their escape from Muskrat Farm. 

Will is careful to keep the notebook he’s brought with him under the sheets but his eyes can’t help but look to it’s twin above the bedcovers next to him. Hannibal notices his gaze and closes the book with hands that are scuffed with violence. 

“Did we talk about teacups and time and the rules of disorder?” he asks.


End file.
